2034: A Novel of the Next World War(57)
Hunt would be there to meet them. In her dream she is always searching for familiar faces, people like Morris, and like her father. But ever since she gave the order for Zhanjiang, she hasn’t been able to find him on the dock. There are too many ships pulling in at once. She asks for help, but the disembarking crews ignore her or can’t see her—Hunt can’t say which. Are they ghosts? Or is she?
She remembers what her father told her, the first time she had the dream. She remembers how young he appeared, and the way he took her by the arm and said, “You don’t have to do this.”
But it had been done.
The stream of ships, disembarking their thousands—they were the evidence.
Her father had once said to her that if you could snap your fingers and bring all of the dead sailors in the Mediterranean Sea to the surface, you’d be able to walk from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Port of Haifa stepping on the backs of sailors—Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Britons, Germans, French, Arabs, and on and on. War at sea began in the Mediterranean, but it might end here, in the South China Sea. Already, in one strike, Sarah Hunt had killed more people than had died across the millennia in the distant Mediterranean.
Among the thickening mass of ghosts, she can’t find her father. She’s calling out for him. But her voice doesn’t carry far enough. And even if it did, what could he tell her?
Nothing—there is nothing he can say to make this crowd disappear so that it could be only the two of them standing on the dock. But she wants to find him, nevertheless. She remembers how he used to take her by the hand and squeeze three times and then she would squeeze four times back. And if she could just feel his hand in hers that might be enough . . . enough to bring back the dead? To forget what she’d done? To be forgiven? Enough for what?
Night after night she lay in her bed, not quite asleep but not quite awake, asking herself that question.
It was after one such night that Hunt had an in-brief scheduled with a new pilot who’d arrived on the Enterprise. When she saw who he was, she’d requested this in-briefing. She knew his history, how the Iranians had taken him down over Bandar Abbas in an F-35; knew that he’d spent some weeks in captivity, and that he’d pulled strings—a whole bunch of strings—to receive orders to the Enterprise, specifically to the one Hornet squadron that she had so controversially modified. She also knew, as she sat at her desk studying his personnel file, that Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell, by either luck or his own design, would be the senior-most pilot in that squadron, making him the de facto commanding officer.
He stood in front of her desk, throwing out his chest in salute, his body magnificently still and his thumbs pinned to the seam of his flight suit, as he held the position of attention. Hunt let him stand there for a moment while she paged through not only his file but also a few media clippings her chief of staff had included, ones that spoke to his family history, those generations of Mitchells who’d flown fighters for the Marines. When she glanced up, she couldn’t help but notice that his attention was fixed on the photograph hanging on the wall behind her; it was of the John Paul Jones, the Chung-Hoon, and the Carl Levin, sailing in a column. It had been taken less than six months ago, a fact she struggled to comprehend. She wondered if, perhaps, Wedge was struggling to comprehend the same.
“At ease, Major Mitchell,” she said, shutting his file and welcoming him aboard the Enterprise. She dispensed some pleasantries, asking how his flight out had been and whether he was comfortable in his assigned quarters, to which he replied that everything was fine. Hunt then got to the point. “No doubt you’re aware that I fired your predecessor.”
Wedge was aware.
“He didn’t agree with certain of my directives,” she added. “I assume we’re not going to have the same problem.” Before Wedge could answer, Hunt explained how every vulnerable system had been stripped from the cockpits of his Hornets. “Even after your downing at Bandar Abbas and our defeat at Mischief Reef, there’s still a whole swath of officers in our military who cling to a cult of technology. They cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that an overreliance on these systems has crippled us. They cannot imagine how this might ultimately be the source of our recent defeats.” Hunt then described the situation as she saw it, a dire picture in which America’s strike on Zhanjiang made a counterstrike on the continental United States inevitable. “An old friend of mine from the academy is on the White House staff. He insists that Beijing will back down, that we’ve made our point and enforced our red line. He’s as smart as they come . . . and he’s been wrong about most things lately, to include this.” And then she looked at Wedge hard and grim, as if she could see every step that was to come, one following another, events progressing like a dark figure stalking a narrow corridor toward an inevitable door. “They’re going to strike at least two US cities. That’ll be their escalation. We hit one. They’ll hit two. Then we’ll have to choose whether or not to de-escalate. We won’t, of course. We’ll strike back, at least three cities. We won’t use strategic nukes; that’s doomsday stuff, not practical. We’ll keep the nukes tactical. Which means they’ll have to come off a carrier. That means you.”
A silence followed as she allowed this vision of hers to coalesce between them. Hunt was watching Wedge, closely observing his reaction to the events she’d described.